![]() |
COOKIES: By using this website you agree that we can place Google Analytics Cookies on your device for performance monitoring. | ![]() |
University of Cambridge > Talks.cam > Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine > Revisiting the Mendelian revolution
![]() Revisiting the Mendelian revolutionAdd to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal
If you have a question about this talk, please contact Nick Hopwood. Much research into heredity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place in such applied contexts as seed production, breeding yeast and cereals for large-scale beer making, mass-manufacture of vaccines, efforts to further public health, administration of psychiatric hospitals and eugenic programmes. In these areas increasing division of labour and more bureaucratic control promoted a culture of expertise and scientificity. We need to understand this if we want to explain the effect on the life sciences of the so-called rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900. Mendelism was not taken up as a theory, but as a set of important methods for realizing scientific values such as analyticity, exactitude, calculability and predictability. Breeders and eugenicists, in particular, shared a combinatorial approach that promised the transparent and reliable production of effects from one generation to the next. Synthetic chemistry, not physics, provided the model science. Framed in this way, the origin of genetics appears as much less of a revolutionary break. The concepts and procedures of early Mendelians fitted rather well into a world that had already been thoroughly shaped by medical and agro-industrial concerns with the production of stable varieties. This talk is part of the Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine series. This talk is included in these lists:
Note that ex-directory lists are not shown. |
Other listsInstitution of Engineering and Technology Public Lectures What is going on in Russia? A Russo-British perspective. Climate week SeminarOther talksOptimising the definition of MR-based lung imaging biomarkers SciBarHealth: Heart Month Locomotion in extinct giant kangaroos? Hopping for resolution. Positive definite kernels for deterministic and stochastic approximations of (invariant) functions TODAY Foster Talk - Integrin-associated adhesion complexes and their role in mechanotransduction Well-posedness of weakly hyperbolic systems of PDEs in Gevrey regularity. |